No Bravos for Theater in News

Curtain call.

Stagy news has a long tradition in Los Angeles, most notably on KABC-TV, which for years opened its pulsating “Eyewitness News” by having its weather guy, sports guy and other supporting actors stride onto the set with apparent great purpose and briefly appear beside the co-anchors, as if posing for a family portrait.

At the first commercial break, zip--they vanished.

Just what this goofy choreography was meant to achieve was never quite clear. But it surely had something to do with creating both a tone of urgency and a public image of familial cohesion for the “Eyewitness News” team, some of whom were not especially fond of each other.

Tradition aside, news and theater do not belong on the same stage. Not ever.

Nonetheless, they continue merging in television, from the KCBS-TV “Control Center”--a gussied-up alcove that’s meant to convey reporting of cosmic news by whomever is posted there--to widely overused live shots designed to ratchet up immediacy and excitement where none exists. As in a reporter checking in Live! from where a crime occurred 24 hours earlier.

Then, too, we have the familiar Team coverage! that crows about more than one person working on a story--something fairly routine, actually--and bulletins delivered by breathless anchors apropos of “This just in! Grant still buried in Grant’s Tomb!”

And don’t forget music, once strictly forbidden in stories, yet increasingly popular in some local newscasts as a device to stir emotions through artificial means, usually in conjunction with human interest topics, as if a straight presentation of facts was incomplete without strings or soft guitars.

Just when you think you’re desensitized, though, bam! Here comes another jolt.

Long the squeaky munchkin of local news in Los Angeles, KCOP-TV displayed its own brand of theatrics late last month in the course of running an intimate, five-part series on a longshot fight for survival by a 35-year-old Santa Monica woman, Melinda Gaffney, who had been told she had terminal bone cancer.

Titled “Search for a Miracle” and reported by Sasha Foo, the “UPN News 13” series was quite moving as it monitored Gaffney’s medical odyssey and her grit in at once fighting her disease and facing the likelihood that it would kill her. Although Foo missed raising some obvious questions about Gaffney’s competing treatments--which could have provided possible life-saving information to other cancer patients--her report did display useful hotlines and succeeded in putting an indelible human face on a medical statistic.

Much less admirable were misleading comments about Gaffney in the studio by Foo and co-anchors Tawny Little and Alan Frio, and by Little in a voice-over.

“She’s quite a fighter,” Foo said after the first night’s segment.

“She’s got two things going for her--faith and family support,” Frio said.

“And a lot of determination and a very strong family,” Foo added.

In a voice-over introducing the second segment, Little said about Gaffney: “She refuses to give up. She’s determined not to be one of the 1,500 people who die from cancer every day.”

Foo commented after the segment: “And you know, medicine can give Melinda treatment and drugs, but what they can’t put in a bottle or a test tube is hope.”

Added Frio: “Exactly, and this doctor seems to be doing that for her right now.”

Added Foo: “She’s grasping very hard for that help.”

Introducing the third segment, Foo said, “Melinda Gaffney is waging a fight for her life against bone cancer. But more than that, she’s fighting to hang on to her life as she knows it. With each day that passes, the struggle becomes more fierce.”

What viewers would not have known, based on what they were hearing, was that two months before the series about her resistance to cancer ran, Melinda Gaffney had died.

Not until the fourth segment, following numerous protest calls earlier that week from two of Gaffney’s friends, did “UPN News 13” inject several past tenses when describing its subject, as in Foo saying live that Gaffney “had a special interest in getting that tumor out of her arm. . . . “

Still, Little promoted the Friday finale--which revealed Gaffney’s death--by announcing that “Melinda continues her extraordinary fight.”

Either the anchors were epic boobs who didn’t know Gaffney had died, or they were willing collaborators in this exploitative sham.

“Referring to her as being alive, so that people would tune in to see what happened next, was egregious,” charged one of Gaffney’s friends, Chris Day. “You’re no longer in the journalism business when you’re doing that, you’re in the soap opera business.”

Agreeing was another of Gaffney’s friends, Andy Scheer, who, like Day, called KCOP staff members several times to express his objections, finally reaching news director Steve Cohen. “They obviously were fearful that the audience would turn it off if they knew she was dead,” Scheer said.

Not true, Cohen said. “The producers felt it was pretty clear, if you were watching the first two pieces, what fate would befall her,” he said. “But I must say, by midweek I was bothered by it and felt they [the anchors and Foo] should be more demonstrative. If you weren’t watching too closely, you might feel we were holding the dramatic [outcome] till the very end.”

And they weren’t? Even though the start of the present ratings sweeps period just happened to coincide with the fourth night of the series? “Absolutely not,” Cohen said.

In any case, the result was good theater, flagrantly deceptive journalism.

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FINAL CURTAIN: The preliminary figure cited was $106,000. But post-election accounting shows that the No on Prop. 9 campaign--which triumphed at the ballot box by a 4-to-1 margin--paid consumer reporter David Horowitz $134,000 for his efforts in TV, radio and direct mail on behalf of the campaign.